A Family
by Forest Archer
Summary: After Agnes leaves, Aramis thinks about what he might have lost, and what he's had all along.


_"You kept him safe. Delivered him to me as you promised you would."_

He will never forget her.

_"Take this. Make a new life together, a long way from France."_

Aramis knows, even as he watches her go, that he will remember Agnes all his life. He knew her such a brief time, and yet there are few people he has ever come to care about so quickly. She has such a good heart. He gives her every coin he has left and it still doesn't feel like enough, yet there is nothing else he can do to protect her now.

They leave together, he and his friends, and return to Paris and all that they are sworn to do. There are more tasks to be done, more lives to save and lose, so much more that they will do. Often he goes long periods without ever thinking of that woman crying for joy as she took her baby back, but he couldn't forget them.

He thinks, sometimes, about what life could have been with them. He imagines a little house, somewhere in the Spanish countryside, a quiet and safe place to live. They would work the land, grow food to provide for their little family; they could raise Henry there and no one would ever know. Perhaps they would change his name, teach him Spanish, never tell a soul that they'd come from France. No one would find out their secret because Aramis would keep them safe, and they could be so happy there.

When he feels alone, sometimes, he lets himself imagine a garden full of wild flowers, lying on the grass with her beside him, singing softly to the baby each French lullaby he's ever known, so that some deep part of all of them will remember who they are.

It's only a dream. They're gone where he cannot reach them now, because in the end she understood exactly what she had to do to protect her son. No one had reason to look for them, but even so she would make sure they were never found. He let that life go.

Some days he wishes he hadn't. Days when evil seems to constantly strike at the heart of what he's sworn to protect, days when he wonders what it is they're fighting for when so much is wrong with the world, days when the musket balls come too close to taking what he loves from him. It makes him long for peace and the family who walked away, a royal fugitive in his mother's arms.

It is not a quiet house he returns to at the end of each day but the musketeer garrison, and yet somehow he is still proud to call it home. There is no woman who loves him there, no child to cry out his name; instead, through the good and the bad, there are his brothers.

Athos, Porthos, D'Artagnan. They are the brothers he chose - the family he was not born with, but the one he belongs to.

On the good days they laugh and talk and boast of all they've done and will do, revelling in each other's company and in their strength, in the darkness they can fight. On the bad days when there are no words to lift the silence they sit and drink, and solace comes from knowing they are still together.

The truth of it is that he would not change the choice he made, if that offer was before him a hundred times again. When he thinks about it, it was not a choice at all. For as long as he has known each of those three men their loyalty to him, and his to them, has never wavered. No matter what has happened, no matter what he's done, they have always been there, offering a hand, always willing to help even if there is nothing they can do. When he was so alone, his body free but his mind still trapped in that empty, bloodied forest, they found him. And they have not left him since.

They live together. They fight together. When they die, Aramis feels somehow sure they will die together, each man too stubborn to die first, and too faithful to let a brother fall before him. He has never known anything like the love he has found in the musketeers.

_"I would ask you to come with us. But you already have a family."_

Sometimes he dreams of a little house and a child and a woman with a beautiful soul, and sometimes he can almost hear a gentle voice singing in the wind. But he does not need to dream to have a family. It is not the one he ever thought he would have, but it is the one he knows he will never let go.


End file.
